Marketing on social media is clearly a successful approach to expand a business, as the size of the worldwide social commerce market grows year after year and is predicted to cross $1 trillion in 2023.
But which social commerce platforms are most popular among users? Not all social networks are created equal; in fact, just because a social network appears on a list of the most popular social media sites based on user numbers doesn’t guarantee it’s good at generating sales.
The best social commerce tools are shown here.
As many as 65.7 million people are anticipated to make a purchase on Facebook in 2023, making it the most popular social commerce platform in the US. By the way, 74.2% of US adults use Facebook, making it the most widely utilized social networking platform in the country.
Facebook purchasing has become more popular in recent years. Just 41.3 million consumers reported making a transaction on Facebook in 2019. Prior to further increases to 56.7 million in 2021 and 63.5 million in 2022, this increased to 51.7 million in 2020. In the near future, Facebook will remain comfortably in the top spot among social commerce platforms. By 2026, there will be as many as 71.1 million people shopping on Facebook.
Instagram, owned by the same parent company as Facebook (Meta), is second on the list of the top social commerce networks. Up to 43 million US consumers are anticipated to make an Instagram purchase in 2023, representing a 4.9% yearly growth. Similar to Facebook, more individuals are expected to start purchasing on Instagram in the coming years. By 2026, experts estimate that 49.7 million users will be making purchases on Instagram.
TikTok and Pinterest, respectively, come in third and fourth place on the list of the best social commerce networks. Currently, TikTok has 33.3 million social shoppers, while Pinterest has 16.9 million.
TikTok moved up to third place for the first time in 2022 after topping Pinterest and experiencing a staggering 73% increase in social purchases year over year. In just two years, the number of users buying on TikTok has multiplied. A tenth of the number anticipated this year, there were only 3.5 million social commerce buyers on the platform in 2020.
Management tools are the next category of social media technologies. With the help of these tools, you may plan your social media postings for a future time and date and monitor audience participation.
They allow owners of e-commerce businesses to conveniently manage one or more of their social media profiles on platforms other than the actual social network. You may save more time by using these social media marketing tools.
Top Social Commerce Tools
Buffer
Buffer is a marketing automation tool that allows you to create a unique schedule for sharing posts to your Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. Simply add posts to your Buffer, and it will queue the posts for the next open time slot in the schedule you created. You can also go back in to edit, move, or delete posts from each social account queue.
This tool allows you to add all your social media posts in advance so that you don’t have to “remember” to schedule posts or so that you can have posts sent out at exact times without manually doing it yourself. It’s great to use to schedule posts after work hours.
Buffer offers a free plan for three social accounts and ten scheduled posts per day. Paid plans start at $15 a month and allow you to connect to eight social accounts and create 100 scheduled posts per day. Buffer also integrates with tools like Feedly (mentioned earlier for content curation).
HootSuite
Hootsuite is a social media management and social media listening tool that allows you to do more than schedule posts to your social accounts. Hootsuite’s social media listening functionality allows you to monitor other aspects of your social media accounts, such as managing audience comments, monitoring keyword mentions, and much more for the following networks.
Read Also: What Are The Best Social Commerce Sites?
The Hootsuite dashboard organizes your social media into tabs and columns. Each tab can hold up to 10 columns. Tabs can be used to organize your social media by account or by activity, such as monitoring your competitor’s social media activity or responding to post comments.
Hootsuite offers a free plan for three social accounts and 20 scheduled posts per day. Paid plans start at $29 per month for use with 10 social accounts and 100 scheduled posts per day.
Sprout Social
Sprout Social is an all-in-one social media management platform that goes beyond scheduling posts and social media listening. It has several features that help with all aspects of the social media management process. For example, its Smart Inbox is a unified social inbox that lets you manage your Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn messages all in one place.
Sprout Social also has a nifty Social CRM feature that helps you build a 360-degree profile of each of your customers, including a history of conversations, contact information, and internal notes about them across your networks.
Sprout Social is available on a tiered subscription model, with a Standard, Professional, and Advanced plan. The Standard plan starts at $99 per user per month.
CoSchedule
CoSchedule has a suite of five tools that span more than just social media management. These five are the Content Organizer, Social Organizer, Marketing Calendar, Work Organizer, and Asset Organizer. The Social Organizer is a social media management tool that covers everything from publishing your posts to measuring how they performed.
The Best Time Scheduling feature takes the guesswork out of figuring out the ideal time of day to schedule your posts – it intelligently tracks peak traffic times and schedules posts for you. If you have gaps, the ReQueue feature will fill them with your top-performing posts.
CoSchedule’s Social Organizer is available in three tiers: Growth, Professional, and Enterprise. The Growth plan starts at $150 per month for three users.
MeetEdgar
MeetEdgar is another full-service social media management platform. But this one’s a bit different – it has the ability to automate your social media strategy. This includes the impressive functionality of writing social media posts for you.
The “Variations” feature allows you to paste in a blog or article you want to post about. From that link, MeetEdgar auto-generates a few different noteworthy quotes or lines that you can then pick or edit (or add your own if you’re not a fan).
Another one of MeetEdgar’s automation features is the auto-scheduler that pulls content from your library to automatically add to your posting calendar. The Continuous Posting feature ensures that your social channels never go silent.
MeetEdgar is available for $49 per month for up to 25 social media accounts.
Nuvi
Nuvi helps with social media management from beginning to end, including social media listening, planning, publishing, engagement, and performance analysis.
As its claim to fame, Nuvi touts itself as the only platform that gives you social media listening capabilities in real-time. This means that, instead of waiting for the lag of other social media listening platforms, you’re able to stay ahead of the curve and on top of your brand’s reputation, as well as capitalize on trends just as quickly as they come and go.
Nuvi doesn’t show pricing information on its website. If you’re interested, contact the company directly to discuss your needs and get a quote.
Social Commerce Tools to Report Analytics
You may find out more about how your social media efforts are succeeding by using social media analytics tools to observe how your audience is expanding, how engagement is rising, and how social interactions are changing into money.
Proprietary Analytics
There’s no better place to start monitoring your social media analytics than with the built-in analytics offered by Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and other social networks. To get access to these analytics, you will have to use the business features provided by each network such as Facebook Pages or business accounts on Instagram and Pinterest.
Facebook Insights provides the most in-depth analytics of any social network. It reports benchmarks like your Page’s reach, audience growth, content, social media engagement, and actions completed on your page.
Be sure to note what types of actions and engagement each social network measures in its analytics, such as a number of likes on a post or the number of people talking about your Page. These may be the signals each social network uses to determine what makes a post popular or what makes a particular account a better search result than another.
Google Analytics
Chances are, you already have a free Google Analytics account set up for your ecommerce store. Within your Google Analytics reports under “Acquisition,” you will find a few reports that focus on social media.
These reports provide insight into which users came to your site from a social network and what they did on your site once they got there.
The “Social Overview” report will give you a quick summary of how much traffic your store has received from social networks and how many conversions (sales) came of those social media referrals. Additional social reports will show you more social networks referring traffic to your store, what pages they landed upon first, and how long they take to convert into sales.
If you haven’t set up conversion tracking in Google Analytics, be sure to refer to this guide to setting up Goals and Funnels if you want to track your store’s sales outside of Shopify’s reports. Once setup, you will be able to learn more about your customer’s website activities – where they came from, what pages they viewed, what products they looked at, and so forth.
Social Report
Social Report is a third-party analytics tool that allows you to aggregate your social media analytics in one dashboard. For ecommerce store owners, this makes it simpler to not only see how your business is doing on one social network, but also to see how your business is doing across the board with audience growth, engagement, and activity from multiple networks.
Social Report is the priciest analytics tool on this list at $49 per month. But in addition to social reports, you can also get analytics from your website, store, and additional networks in one place and by email.
It’s the perfect social media tool to use if you want to stay informed about your business’ online visibility and engagement. It will also save you vast amounts of time, since you won’t have to login to each source of analytics separately on a daily basis.
Finally
You can see that there are a number of excellent, free social media management solutions available. The seven we’ve discussed here are worth considering, particularly if you intend to increase the scope of your social media activities in the future. You will avoid the headache of switching to and adjusting to a new tool later by starting with a tool that can grow with you.
Below are the social commerce tools to keep in mind:
- Buffer: best if you plan to scale your social media efforts for scaling.
- Friends+Me: best if you’re just getting started with social media.
- Later: best for scheduling posts to most of the major social platforms.
- CoSchedule: best if you want an all in one platform for social media and other marketing campaigns.
- Hootsuite: best if you want to schedule organic posts and have a budget for promoted posts.
- Crowdfire: best if you’re interested in curation as a way to keep your social media calendar full and heighten engagement.
- Tailwind: best if your focus is on visual platforms like Instagram and Pinterest.
